For a while at work, whenever we’d do any sort of update of code, we’d announce it to users. Sometimes it was ultra-minor features, and we’d just make announcements like, “We fixed a few back-end bugs that may make the site nominally faster,” just for the sake of announcing that we were doing things. But I found a curious effect: we’d fix a single line of code causing a very specific bug, and soon, people started writing in about all sorts of new problems. Some of them were bugs that we’ve known about for months, others were things that were impossible, and the rest were things that couldn’t possibly have been related to the change we made. And then others would pile on, saying things like, “They have problems like this every time they release new updates,” and whatnot. The psychology of this fascinated me, and, when we did updates that had minimal user impact, I started lobbying to make no announcement about them. And when we did that, the number of complaints about bugs dropped. People still reported actual bugs, but it put an end to the “Can’t they do an update that doesn’t break more features than it adds?” posts that blamed our updates for bugs that we didn’t introduce.

The Latin term non-sequitur seemed fitting for that phenomenon, and also for something else that I always found interesting: arguments about the politics of very personal matters. Some have argued that gay marriage out to be banned because homosexuals cannot conceive children, for example, even though no one argues that infertile heterosexual couples ought to be denied the same right, nor is it even a sane reason to ban marriage.

Here’s my latest non-sequitur. And it’s totally true, even though it makes no sense at all: since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I’ve at least doubled the number of times I’ve entered my password incorrectly. It’s a remarkable difference, though perhaps aided by confirmation bias. But the thing is, even with confirmation bias accounted for, it really is happening way more often. But I can usually feel my fingers making the mistake, so I know it’s not a Snow Leopard bug. The only logical conclusion is that Snow Leopard is actually making me press the wrong keys. (Actually, an equally-probable conclusion is that Leopard would allow logins with the incorrect password, and now it’s actually checking it. I’m pretty sure neither of these is true, though.)

Actually, another example of the logical fallacies here is perhaps better shown by the best use of US taxpayer money ever, this diagram purportedly created by the US Department of Transportation, demonstrating that “correlation does not mean causation” by showing an eerily exact precise trend that doesn’t make any sense to have even thought about graphing.